Email Parser API

The Email Parser API supports both raw email text and standard .eml files, which are the universal format for storing email messages. You can upload an .eml file directly via the /v1/email/upload endpoint or send raw email content as a JSON string to the /v1/email/text endpoint. The API automatically detects the input format and applies the appropriate parsing strategy. For .eml files, the parser handles the full MIME structure including multipart boundaries, encoded headers, and nested content. For raw text input, it parses RFC 5322-compliant email format with headers separated from the body by a blank line. Both methods return identical structured JSON output.

The API extracts over 30 data fields from each email message. This includes all addressing headers (From, To, Cc, Bcc) with separated display names and email addresses, the Subject line decoded from any encoding, and the Date parsed into ISO-8601 format. Message content is extracted in both HTML and plain text versions. Attachments are catalogued with filename, MIME content type, size, and base64-encoded content. Routing metadata includes Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References headers for threading, plus Received headers showing the email's server path. Priority flags, Return-Path, and all raw headers are also included in the structured JSON response.

The API automatically detects and processes all email attachments during parsing. For each attachment, the response includes the original filename, MIME content type (such as application/pdf or image/jpeg), file size in bytes, and the attachment content encoded in base64 format. You can decode the base64 string to reconstruct the original file in your application. The API distinguishes between regular attachments that users explicitly added and inline attachments like embedded images referenced in HTML content. It handles all standard file types including documents, images, archives, and spreadsheets. For emails with multiple attachments, each is returned as a separate object in the attachments array.

Yes, the API provides comprehensive character encoding support for parsing international emails. It handles UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859 family encodings for European languages, Windows-1251 for Cyrillic, Windows-1256 for Arabic, Shift_JIS and ISO-2022-JP for Japanese, GB2312 and GBK for Chinese, EUC-KR for Korean, and many other regional encodings. The parser automatically detects the encoding specified in the Content-Type charset header and applies the correct decoder. When no encoding is specified, it uses heuristic detection based on byte patterns. All output is normalized to UTF-8 for consistent processing. Content-Transfer-Encoding methods like quoted-printable and base64 are fully supported as well.

Yes, the Email Parser API is built to handle complex and deeply nested email structures that challenge simpler parsers. It correctly processes multipart/mixed messages with attachments, multipart/alternative messages with both text and HTML versions, and multipart/related messages with inline images. The parser handles forwarded messages containing embedded original emails, email chains with quoted content, and messages with multiple levels of MIME nesting. It identifies MIME boundary markers, recursively processes each section according to its content type, and maintains the hierarchical relationships between parts. This makes it reliable for processing business correspondence, automated notification emails, and complex marketing messages.

The Email Parser API processes most standard emails in under 2 seconds, with simple text-only messages completing in under 500 milliseconds. Processing time scales with email complexity and attachment size. Emails with large attachments or deeply nested MIME structures may take slightly longer. The API accepts emails up to 10MB in total size, which accommodates the vast majority of business emails. For optimal performance with high-volume processing, we recommend implementing asynchronous workflows using job queues and processing emails in parallel batches. The API supports concurrent requests across all paid plans, allowing you to scale throughput by increasing parallelism rather than waiting for sequential responses.